Broadcom/VMware finally made a change that pro community and has made VMware Workstation Pro and free for personal use. I was wondering if anyone has tried it out yet. It may be that this community is more familiar with other Type2 Hypervisors. I’d be curious to hear about anyone’s experience and use cases.
More info about free VMware Workstation Pro.
Thanks,
Alain
I have been using Workstation for a decade at this point. I noticed the news as well. Although I think this is just to make it easier to pull the plug on later.
That said Workstations runs on the Framework 13 perfectly under both Windows or Linux.
I used it for a long time, many years ago (and would probably still be using it if not for a technical problem I won’t bore anyone with). At the time it was very good, and I have no reason to think that it has gone downhill since.
That said, I strongly suspect that @2disbetter is correct: Broadcom is just cutting it loose, and it’s going to die, either slowly through neglect or abruptly when they decide out of the blue that it isn’t worth their effort to continue.
There’s always the chance that they’ll do something interesting with it, like open-sourcing it, but with Broadcom’s reputation, I’d put that chance in the very low single digits.
Personally, given that they are continuing to sell it to businesses, it seemed to me to be more a way to kill off Player and no longer have to support or develop that, but who knows.